Alison had been bugging him lately about getting more exercise; maybe she was right.
He got the door open, and for a moment stood on the threshold carefully surveying his apartment. TV and VCR sitting on their woodgrain stand right where they were supposed to be. Check. The doors to kitchen and bedroom standing half-open at exactly the angles he'd put them before he'd left for work that morning. Check.
Through his panting Radley heaved a cautious sigh of relief. The existence of the TV showed no burglars had come and gone; the carefully positioned doors showed no one had come and was still there.
At least, no one probably was still there....
As quietly as he could, he stepped into the apartment and closed the door, turning the doorknob lock but leaving the three deadbolts open in case he had to make a quick run for it. On a table beside the door stood an empty pewter vase.
He picked it up by its slender neck, left the yellow plastic bag on the floor by the table and tiptoed to the bedroom door. Steeling himself, panting as quietly as was humanly possible, he nudged the door open and peered in. No one. Still on tiptoe, he repeated the check with the kitchen, with the same result.
He gave another sigh of relief. Alison thought he was a little on the paranoid side, and wasn't particularly hesitant about saying so. But he read the papers and he watched the news, and he knew that the quiet evil of the city was nothing to be ignored or scoffed at.
But once more, he'd braved the evil—braved it, and won, and had made it back to his own room and safety. Heading back to the door, he locked the deadbolts, returned the vase to its place on the table, and retrieved the yellow bag.
It was only as he was walking to the kitchen with it, his mind now freed from the preoccupations of survival in a hostile world, that his brain finally registered what his fingers had been trying to tell him all along.
The yellow bag was not, in fact, made of plastic.
"Huh," he said aloud, raising it up in front of his eyes for a closer look.
It looked like plastic, certainly, like the same plastic they'd been delivering phone books in for he couldn't remember how many years. But the feel of the thing was totally wrong for plastic.
In fact, it was totally wrong for anything.
"Well, that's funny," he said, continuing on into the kitchen. Laying the bag on the table, he pulled up one of the four more-or-less-matching chairs and sat down.
For a minute he just looked at the thing, rubbing his fingers slowly across its surface and digging back into his memory for how these bags had felt in the past. He couldn't remember, exactly; but it was for sure they hadn't felt like this. This wasn't like any plastic he'd ever felt before. Or like any cloth, or like any paper.
"It's something new, then," he told himself. "Maybe one of those new plastics they're making out of corn oil or something."
The words weren't much comfort. In his mind's eye, he saw the thriller that had been on cable last week, the one where the spy had been blown to bits by a shopping bag made out of plastic explosive....
He gritted his teeth. "That's stupid," he said firmly. "Who in the world would go to that kind of trouble to kill me? Period; end of discussion," he added to forestall an argument. Alison had more or less accepted his habit of talking to himself, especially when he hadn't seen her for a couple of days. But even she drew the line at arguing aloud with himself. "End of discussion," he repeated.
"So. Let's quit this nonsense and check out the ad."
He took a deep breath, exhaled it explosively like a shotputter about to go into his little loop-de-spin. Taking another deep breath, he reached into the bag and, carefully, pulled the phone book out.
Nothing happened.
"There—you see?" he chided himself, pushing the bag across the table and pulling the directory in front of him. "Alison's right; there's paranoia, and then there's para-noi-a. Gotta stop watching those late cable shows. Now, let's see here..."
He checked his white-pages listings first, both his apartment's and the print shop's. Both were correct. "Great," he muttered. "And now"—he hummed himself a
little trumpet flourish as he turned to the Yellow Pages—"the piece de resistance. Let your fingers do the walking through the Yellow Pages, dum dum de dum..." He reached the L's, turned past to the P's... And there it was. Blazing out at him, in full three-color glory, the display ad for Grussing A-One-Excellent Printing And Copying.
"Now that," he told himself proudly, "is an ad. You just wait, Radley old boy—an ad like that'll get you more business than you know what to do with. You'll see—there's nowhere to go but up from now on."
He leafed through the pages, studying all the other print-shop ads and trying hard not to notice that six of his competitors had three-color displays fully as impressive as his own. That didn't matter. His ad—and the business it was going to bring in—would lift him up out of the hungry pack, bring him to the notice of important people with important printing needs. "You'll see," he told himself confidently. The Printers heading gave way to Printers—Business Forms, and then to Printing Equipment and Printing Supplies. "Huh; Steven's has moved," he noted with some surprise. He hadn't bought anything from Steven's for over a year—probably about time he checked out their prices again. Idly, he turned another page—
And stopped. Right after the short listing of Prosthetic Devices was a heading he'd never seen before.
Prostitutes.
"Well, I'll be D-double-darned," he muttered in amazement. "I didn't know they could advertise."
He let his eyes drift down the listings, turned the page. There were a lot of names there—almost as many, he thought, as the attorney listings at the other end of the Yellow Pages, except that unlike the lawyers, the prostitutes had no display ads. "Wonder when the phone company decided to let this go in." He shook his head. "Hoo, boy—the egg's gonna hit the fan for sure when the Baptists see this."
He scanned down the listing. Names—both women's and a few men's—addresses, phone numbers—it was all there. Everything anyone so inclined would need to get themselves some late-night companionship.
He frowned. Addresses. Not just post office boxes. Real street addresses.
Home addresses.
"Wait just a minute, here," he muttered. "Just a D-double-darned minute."
Nevada, he'd heard once, had legal prostitution; but here—"This is nuts," he decided. The cops could just go right there and arrest them. Couldn't they? I mean, even those escort and massage places usually just have phone numbers.
Don't they?"
With the phone book sitting right in front of him, there was an obvious way to answer that question. Sticking a corner of the yellow bag in to mark his place, he turned backwards toward the E's. Excavating Contractors, Elevators
—oops; too far—
He froze, finger and thumb suddenly stiff where they gripped a corner of the page. A couple of headings down from Elevators was another list of names, shorter than the prostitutes listing but likewise distinguished by the absence of display ads. And the heading here... Embezzlers.
His lips, he suddenly noticed, were dry. He licked them, without noticeable effect. "This," he said, his words sounding eerie in his ears, "is nuts.
Embezzlers don't advertise. I mean, come on now."
He willed the listing to vanish, to change to something more reasonable, like Embalmers. But that heading was there, too... and the Embezzlers heading didn't go away.
He took a deep breath and, resolutely, turned the page. "I've been working too hard," he informed himself loudly. "Way too hard. Now. Let's see, where was I going... right—escort services."
He found the heading and its page after page of garish and seductive display ads. Sure enough, none of them listed any addresses. Just for completeness, he flipped back to the M's, checking out the massage places. Some had addresses; others—the ones advertising out-calls only—had just phone numbers.
"Makes sense," he decided. "Otherwise the cops and self-appointed guardians of public morals could just sit there and scare all their business away. So what gives with this?" He started to turn back to the prostitute listing, his fingers losing their grip on the slippery pages and dropping the book open at the end of the M's—